Buy А Whisker

Chapter 1

Elvis had left the building. I watched him make his way across the snow-packed front walk to my SUV, parked in the driveway. I opened the passenger door, and he dipped his dark head in acknowledgment before he disappeared inside. The cat—not the swivel-hipped singer—had been named after the King of Rock and Roll, and he’d pretty much trained everyone around him to cater to him like he was royalty, musical or otherwise.

Elvis settled himself on the passenger seat and turned to look over his shoulder as I backed onto the street, the way he always did. It was icy-cold, and my breath hung in the morning air. It was also very early. One of the best things about sharing the drive to work with the cat was the fact that he wouldn’t try to engage me in conversation before I’d had at least one cup of coffee.

Lily’s Bakery was the only place to get a decent cup of coffee before seven a.m. in North Harbor, Maine. We had no fast-food outlets, no drive-throughs. The slower pace of life was what attracted so many tourists, that and the gorgeous scenery along the Maine coast.

As usual, Lily was behind the counter when I tapped on the door. She kept the shop locked until seven thirty but let in regulars like me who stopped for coffee and a muffin to start the day. She smiled and came to open the door, and the warmth of the small space with its delicious aroma of fresh bread and cinnamon wrapped around me.

Lily ran Lily’s Bakery with some help from her mother and another baker. She’d been selling her baking since she was twelve. The small building on the waterfront that housed the bakery had been left to Lily by her grandfather. She’d opened the business when she was twenty and had been running it, successfully as far as I knew, ever since.

“Hi, Sarah,” she said. She was wearing skinny jeans and a pink thermal shirt with her long, dark hair up in its usual high ponytail. When she was in the kitchen, she kept her hair under a Patriots ball cap.

“Good morning,” I said, trying not to yawn.

I could smell the rich, dark-roast coffee. I stopped by the bakery a couple times a week, and it was always made by six thirty. Lily had her morning routines, and she kept them like clockwork. She’d told me once that she got everything ready for the morning before she left the night before so she didn’t have to waste time going down to the basement, where she kept a lot of her supplies.

Lily reached for the pot, and I handed her my stainless-steel mug. I looked in the glass-front display case as she poured, wondering if a chocolate éclair could be classed as breakfast food.

“You really need to have some protein at breakfast,” she said.

I looked over at her. “I need some breakfast at breakfast.”

She smiled, which I thought she didn’t do enough of. “What’s in your refrigerator, Sarah? You don’t have to stick to traditional breakfast food in the morning, you know.”

I took the mug she was holding out and recited the contents of my fridge. “Three eggs, two tomatoes that taste like the carton the eggs are in, and a spinach quiche that fell.”

Lily looked confused. “Quiche doesn’t fall.”

I moved to the end of the counter for the insulated carafe that held cream and the glass-and-stainless-steel sugar-cube dispenser that looked like a futuristic spaceship.

“It does if your hands are wet when you pick up the dish,” I said, adding cream and two sugar lumps to my mug. “Half the egg-and-cheese stuff went on the floor, and the spinach all slid to one end.” I stirred my coffee and screwed the lid on. “And then I kind of forgot to set the timer when I put it in the oven, so the spinach turned out extra crispy.” I walked back over to her. “Let’s just say I don’t think even the raccoons would eat it if I dumped it in the backyard.”

I could see Lily was trying not to laugh. “Hang on a minute, Sarah,” she said. She went back to the kitchen and returned after a minute with something wrapped in waxed paper. “Here. An apple-raisin roll with some Swiss cheese, on the house.”

“Thank you,” I said, taking it from her.

Lily walked me to the door. I glanced at the inky sky through the big front window. There was something smeared on the glass, I realized.

I took a step closer to the window. “Lily, were you egged?” I asked.

She nodded, folding her arms defensively over her chest. “This is the second time.”

“Because of the development?”

“Yes.”

About two and a half months ago, a developer from Massachusetts had proposed a mixed-use project—housing and business—for part of the harbor front, unique to the area and environmentally responsible. It had the potential to increase tourist traffic, and since all the businesses along the harbor front depended on visitors for a big part of their income, everyone had gotten behind the idea. Everyone except Lily.

“Did you call the police?” I asked. It looked like the culprit had used an entire carton of eggs on the window.

“I did,” she said with a shrug. “But it happened in the middle of the night. There isn’t much the police can do. No one was around, and I don’t have a security camera.”

She eyed the smeared glass for a moment; then she looked at me again. “It’s been more than just eggs.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Someone switched a canister of sugar for salt in the kitchen, they canceled a delivery of cardboard cake boxes and waxed paper, and I’m pretty sure someone let a mouse loose in the store.” She pulled a hand over her neck. “I can’t prove any of it has anything to do with the harbor-front proposal, but realistically, what else could it be?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Egging the windows and switching sugar for salt is childish. You don’t deserve this kind of thing just because you don’t want to sell the bakery.”

Lily exhaled slowly. “Some people don’t see it that way.” Then she shook her head. “Luckily, the egg will come right off with the ice scraper I use on my windshield.” She pasted on a smile that told me the conversation was over. “Anyway, I need to get back to the kitchen. Have a good day, Sarah.”

“You too,” I said. “Thanks for breakfast.”

Elvis’s whiskers twitched as I climbed back into the SUV. He eyed the wax-paper-wrapped sandwich and then looked expectantly at me.

“You can have a tiny bite of cheese when we get to the shop,” I said, pulling my keys out of my jacket pocket. He immediately settled himself on the seat, looking straight ahead through the windshield, his not-so-subtle way of saying, “Let’s get going.”

My store, Second Chance, was a cross between a secondhand store and an antiques shop. We’d been open for less than a year. We sold everything from furniture to housewares to musical instruments—mostly from the fifties through the seventies. Some of our stock had been repurposed from its original use, like the tub chair under the front window that in its previous life had actually been a bathtub, or the quilts my friend Jess made from recycled fabric. I often went in to the shop early if I had a project on the go. At the moment I was working on removing five coats of paint from an old wooden dresser that dated to the early 1900s.

I’d worked in radio after college until I’d been replaced on the air by a syndicated music feed and a tanned nineteen-year-old who read the weather twice an hour. As a kid I’d spent my summers in North Harbor with my grandmother. It was where my father had grown up. I’d even bought a house that I’d renovated and rented. When my job disappeared, I’d come to Gram’s, at the urging of my mom, to sulk for a while and ended up staying and opening Second Chance. The store was in a redbrick house, built in late 1800s, in downtown North Harbor, Maine, just where Mill Street began to climb uphill. We were about a fifteen- to twenty-minute walk from the harbor front and close to the off-ramp from the highway, which meant we were easy for tourists to find and get to.

I parked the SUV at the far end of the parking lot. Elvis already had a paw in the top of my canvas tote, his way of letting me know he had no intention of walking across the lot to the back door. I scooped him inside the bag and grabbed my breakfast.

The first thing I did when I got inside was nudge the heat up a few degrees, grateful that my brother, Liam, had checked the old house from top to bottom before I’d bought it. He’d discovered that the old furnace was on its last legs, and I’d managed to get the seller to knock several thousand dollars off the purchase price.

Elvis and I had breakfast in my second-floor office while the workroom warmed up, and he managed to mooch two bites of Swiss cheese. After I ate, I grabbed my dust mask and left him there washing his face.

It was a busy morning, and I didn’t go back to my office until it was time to leave to meet my friend Jess for lunch. Wrapped in my heavy parka, I cut across the parking lot and stepped inside the old garage we used for storage, tugging on the soft gray hat that my grandmother’s friend Rose had knitted for me. I pulled my gloves out of the pocket of my jacket.

“I’m leaving,” I called to Mac. “Can I bring you anything back?”

Mac was in the far corner of the building, gloves and jacket off, working on the knot that kept a pair of old brown blankets wrapped securely around two ladder-back chairs.

Mac was the proverbial jack-of-all-trades. There wasn’t anything he couldn’t fix as far as I’d seen. Second Chance may have been my store, but Mac was more partner than employee.

“Yeah,” he said. “Maybe a turkey sandwich and some soup.” He looked in my direction then and held up one hand, feeling for his wallet with the other.

I shook my head. “That’s okay,” I said. “I’ll get it when I get back.”

He smiled. “Thanks.”

Mac was tall and strong with close-cropped black hair and light brown skin. He’d been a financial planner, but he’d walked away from his high-powered job to come to Maine and sail. It was his passion. All summer in his free time he had crewed for pretty much anyone who asked. There were eight windjammer schooners that tied up at the North Harbor dock, along with dozens of other boats. Eventually Mac wanted to build his own boat. He worked for me because he said he liked doing something where he could see some progress at the end of the day. He was an intensely private man, so I didn’t know much more about him now than I had when I’d hired him a bit more than six months ago, but I’d always been able to count on him and I trusted him completely.

He rubbed his hands together and blew on them. “Tell Jess I should have a couple of boxes for her at the end of the week.”

I nodded. “I will. I should be back in about an hour.”

I walked across the parking lot, happy to see several cars parked there. January was a slow month for pretty much every business in North Harbor, but it hadn’t been as quiet as I had expected. Maybe that was because we were a resale shop. Our prices weren’t cheap, but they were reasonable and on most things I was willing to dicker.

I’d backed my SUV into the last space at the end of the small parking lot—which was even smaller at the moment, thanks to the mountains of snow that flanked it on two sides—so only a little snow had drifted onto the front window. As soon as the engine was running, I turned on the heater and got back out to brush the snow off my windshield. When I’d bought the used SUV in the fall, Liam had tried to convince me to choose a vehicle with seat warmers. I was starting to think I should have listened to him.

I had no trouble finding a place to park when I got downtown. North Harbor sits on the midcoast of Maine. “Where the hills touch the sea” was the way it’d been described for the past two-hundred-plus years. The town stretched from the Swift Hills in the north to the Atlantic Ocean in the south. It was settled in the late 1760s by Alexander Swift, and it was full of beautiful, historic buildings and quirky little businesses. Not to mention some award-winning restaurants. The town’s year-round population was about thirteen thousand people, but that number more than tripled in the summer with summer residents and tourists.

North Harbor was very different in the middle of winter than it was in the summer and fall. I wouldn’t have been able to park just a couple of doors down from McNamara’s in August, and there would have been more than three tables occupied inside the small sandwich shop. Jess was at a table to the left of the main counter. Her hands were wrapped around a heavy mug of what I guessed was hot chocolate, and she was deep in conversation with Glenn McNamara.

Jess had grown up in North Harbor, but we really hadn’t been friends as kids, probably because I was a summer kid and she was a townie. We’d gotten close in college, when I’d put an ad on the music-department bulletin board at the University of Maine, looking for a roommate. Jess had been the only person to call because, it turned out, she’d taken the ad down about five minutes after I’d put it up.

Jess had been studying art history and I’d been doing a business degree and taking every music course I could manage to fit into my schedule, but we’d become fast friends. It was impossible not to like her. She had an offbeat sense of humor and a quirky sense of style.

Glenn caught sight of me first. “Hey, Sarah,” he said. “Has it gotten any warmer?” He was tall with broad shoulders and still wore his blond hair in the brush cut he’d had as a college football player.

I shook my head as I pulled off my gloves and hat. “No,” I said. “According to Rose, it’s cold enough to freeze the brass off a bald monkey.”

Glenn laughed.

Rose Jackson wasn’t just one of my grandmother’s closest friends, she also worked part-time for me at the shop, along with another of Gram’s friends, Charlotte Elliot. Rose had been a teacher and Charlotte a school principal. I’d known them my whole life, so working with them meant I got mothered and gently—or sometimes not so gently—instructed on what I should do a lot of the time.

I loved them and I knew they loved me and only wanted me to be happy. We just didn’t always agree on what that was.

I pulled my hands through my dark hair. I kept it in long layers to my shoulders. Without the layers it would have stood up all over my head in the dry air when I pulled off my hat.

“At least we dodged that storm that came down from the Great Lakes,” Glenn said with a shrug of his shoulders.

Jess and I nodded in agreement. My grandmother, who had grown up in North Harbor, said that there were only three topics of conversation in town during the winter: the blizzard that had missed us, the blizzard that was headed our way, and the blizzard that we were standing in the middle of. She was more or less right.

“What can I get you?” Glenn asked as I took off my jacket and hung it on the back of my chair. The little shop smelled like fresh bread and cinnamon.

I glanced at Jess.

“I already ordered,” she said.

“I’ll have a bowl of whatever the soup of the day is and a cheese roll, please,” I said.

He nodded. “Coffee, tea or hot chocolate?”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Jess swipe a dab of whipped cream from the edge of her dark blue mug and lick it off her finger.

“Hot chocolate, please,” I said. “But no whipped cream.”

“I’ll take hers,” Jess immediately said, holding up her mug.

Glenn smiled. “It’ll be just a couple of minutes.”

I sat down opposite Jess, loosening the scarf at my neck. “So how was your morning?” I asked.

She took a long drink from her hot chocolate before she answered. She was wearing a deep-blue V-neck sweater over a lighter blue T-shirt, and her long brown hair was pulled back in a low ponytail. She was my height—about five six—and her eyes were blue where mine were brown. Jess had the kind of figure that people described as curvy, where I was usually described as looking athletic.

“Busy,” she said. “I have twenty-five choir robes to alter, plus three bridesmaids’ dresses and a cape to finish before Valentine’s Day.” She held up a hand. “And I’m not complaining. I’m not usually this busy this time of year.”

Jess was a seamstress. She could and did do everything from hemming a pair of jeans to designing and sewing some spectacular gowns. What she enjoyed most was reworking vintage clothing from the fifties through the seventies. She had a funky, off-beat style and was a whiz with a sewing machine and a pair of scissors. Just about everything she restyled ended up in a little used- and vintage-clothing shop down on the waterfront that she shared space in with a couple of other women. And she made one-of-a-kind quilts from recycled fabric that we sold for her on consignment in the store. The three-quarter-length cocoa-brown hooded coat tossed over the empty chair to her left had originally been a full-length wrap coat with shoulder pads so wide it could have been worn by a linebacker for the Patriots. Jess had reworked it into something that would have been at home on the pages of a fashion magazine.

“That reminds me,” I said, turning in my chair to stuff my gloves into my jacket pocket. “Mac asked me to tell you he should have a couple of boxes for you by the end of the week.”

Mac and I were always looking for new items to sell in the shop. Families overwhelmed by clearing out their parents’ homes had led to some great finds for us, including the claw-foot bathtub that Mac and I had made over into a chair that I hadn’t been able to bring myself to sell when it was done. Occasionally we took on clearing out an entire house—something we’d just finished doing for the five children of Janet Bennett.

Since we didn’t sell clothing at Second Chance, Jess often bought items she felt she could rework or turn into quilts. She’d been making her own clothes since she was teenager. She liked to say that she’d been an environmentalist before it was cool. Mac pretty much knew her likes and dislikes. Families and seniors themselves tended to just throw up their hands over closets stuffed full of old clothing, and “Just make it go away” was something we’d heard more than once.

“That’ll work,” Jess said. “Thanks. Do you know what he has?”

“I think there are a couple of fake-fur vests, and I know I saw some jeans.”

Her eyes lit up, and I knew she was already dreaming up ideas for everything.

Glenn came back with our lunch then: chili and a couple of sesame breadsticks for Jess, vegetable noodle soup and a roll crusted with golden cheddar for me.

“Thanks,” I said as he set a tall, steaming mug of cocoa in front of me. A small bowl of whipped cream and a spoon were still on the tray he was holding. He put a dollop in Jess’s cup, said, “Enjoy,” and left.

“Why don’t you just order a cup of whipped cream next time?” I said.

“Do you think I could do that?” Jess asked as she pulled apart one of the breadsticks. “Maybe with lots of chocolate shavings and just a couple of inches of hot chocolate in the bottom.”

I made a face and shook my head at her.

She grinned back at me across the table. “So how was your morning?” She pointed at me with half a breadstick before taking a big bite off the end of it.

“Good,” I said. “I sanded a dresser and then I worked on the website.” We were running a small online store through the Second Chance website. I was constantly surprised by the things collectors were willing to buy and pay the shipping for.

I remembered something I’d wanted to ask Jess. “Did those two vanloads of skiers stop in at the store yesterday afternoon?” I asked. “Avery gave them directions.”

Avery was the granddaughter of Liz French, another of my grandmother’s closest cohorts. She was living with Liz after some problems at home and going to a progressive high school that only had morning classes, so she worked most afternoons for me. Avery had an eclectic sense of style and a smart mouth, and being around her grandmother Liz and Liz’s friends seemed to be good for her. It had always been good for me.

Jess nodded and wiped a bit of chili from her chin with her napkin. “They did. I sold three sweaters and two pairs of jeans.” She smiled. “I love Canadians.”

This winter, due to some weird configuration of the jet stream, Maine had a lot more snow than the Canadian Maritime provinces. We’d had a steady stream of skiers since the first week of December. They were responsible for more than half of my business in the last two months, and I was hoping the weather would work in our favor through February.

“Did you go running last night?” Jess asked, a contrived look of innocent inquiry on her face.

I reached for my cheese roll. “Yes, I did,” I said. “Would you like to hear how many laps I did around the track, or would you rather just ask me what you really want to know, which is did I see Nick Elliot?”

She shrugged. “Okay. Did you?”

Like Jess, Nick Elliot had grown up in North Harbor. Charlotte was his mother. They were a lot alike—sensible, reliable, practical. Unlike Jess, Nick and I had been friends as kids. I’d had a massive crush on him at one time. He’d worked as a paramedic for years, but now he was an investigator for the state medical examiner’s office. He was still built like a big teddy bear—assuming teddy bears were tall, with broad shoulders. He had sandy hair, warm brown eyes and a ready smile. He wasn’t quite the shaggy-haired wannabe musician he’d been when we were teenagers, but as Gram would say, he cleaned up well.

I dunked a hunk of bread in my soup and ate it before I answered. “No, I didn’t. Nick feels pretty much the same about running as you do.”

She smirked at me across the table. “You mean he only runs if someone is giving away free cookies? Go Nick.” She did a fist pump in the air.

“If you think Nick is such a catch, why don’t you go out with him?” I asked.

She wrinkled her nose at me. “Not my type. Anyway, whenever you’re around, he doesn’t notice any other women. We could be at the pub and I could get up and dance on one of the tables in a thong while Sam and the guys did “Satisfaction,” and Nick still wouldn’t notice me. I think you should at least have a little fling with him.”

“Well, I don’t,” I said dryly, “and thank you for putting that picture of you dancing at the pub in my head for the rest of the day.”

“You’re welcome,” she said, wiggling her eyebrows at me before she bent her head over her chili again.

Jess kept insisting that Nick had had a thing for me since we were teenagers, and certainly Charlotte and some of Gram’s other friends hadn’t been subtle in their matchmaking efforts, but Nick hadn’t made a move, which I couldn’t fault him for because neither had I.

“Nick and I are just friends,” I said for what felt like the twentieth time. “Between the shop and working on the last apartment at the house, I don’t have time to have a relationship or a fling or anything with Nick—or anyone else.”

Jess grunted around a mouthful of beans and tomato sauce. She swallowed and gestured at me with her spoon. “You make time to eat. You make time to run, for heaven’s sake. You can make time for a little tongue wrestling with Nick.”

“That’s disgusting,” I said. “I’m changing the subject. No more talking about Nick Elliot’s tongue.” I could see Jess was about to say something. I shot her a stern look. “Or any other part of him,” I warned. “Tell me about the meeting yesterday with the North Landing people.”

Her expression turned serious. “Lily still won’t even talk about selling the bakery, and there doesn’t seem to be any legal way the town council can expropriate the land. And there doesn’t seem to be any way to rework the plan around her either.”

“Was she even at the meeting?” I asked.

Jess shook her head. “No, and it’s a good thing she wasn’t. Time is getting short and people’s tempers are even shorter.” She played absently with the end of a breadstick. “You know how tense things have been around town for the last couple of weeks. It was even worse last night. Jon West isn’t going to wait much longer. If he can’t build here, he’s going to take the project somewhere else. He wants North Landing to be his showpiece, a way to entice other towns and cities to build similar projects, but he isn’t going to wait forever. Some people are pushing for the council to go to court and find a way to force Lily to sell under eminent domain.”

Jon West owned North by West, the development company floating the harbor-front project. I had a vintage light fixture at the shop that he’d expressed an interest in having us refurbish for the hotel that was planned as part of the development.

“I don’t see how that would work,” I said, tucking a loose strand of hair behind my ear.

“Me neither,” Jess said. “And even if it did. It would be so ugly.” She dipped the end of her breadstick in her soup and took a bite. “The weird thing is there was a proposal for the waterfront almost five years ago, right after Lily opened, and she didn’t have a problem with that.”

“People change,” I said. “She’s being hassled at the bakery, you know.”

“How do you know?” Jess asked.

“I stopped for coffee this morning. Someone had egged the big front window.”

Jess just shook her head.

“I wish there were some way to change Lily’s mind.” I pushed my empty bowl away. I couldn’t read the expression in Jess’s eyes—frustration, maybe, mixed with a little sadness.

“It’s not going to happen,” she said flatly. “As far as Lily is concerned, the development will destroy the charm of the waterfront. I think she’s wrong, but . . .” She shrugged. “On the one hand, I kind of admire her for sticking to her principles. On the other hand, I think the development would be good for business, and it’s not like I have a money tree in my backyard.”

I reached for my cup. “Vince said pretty much the same thing to me yesterday.” Vince Kennedy played in The Hairy Bananas with Sam Newman, who owned The Black Bear pub and who had been a second father to me since my own dad died when I was five.

Jess ate the last spoonful of her chili and nodded. “Lily holding out is a lot worse for him. He’d be able to unload that old building his father still owns. He’d be free of the taxes, and I’m guessing with his father in that nursing home, they could use the money.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I think the development offer on that old warehouse is pretty much the only offer Vince has had in the last four years.”

“I have a feeling this is just going to get uglier than it already is,” Jess said. “I wish Lily could see what holding out is doing to the town. People are desperate to make North Landing happen.” Her mouth twisted to one side. “And when people get desperate, they do stupid things.”